Structural Patterns

Donate money to help bring one of Sam Van Aken trees to Brooklyn! Artist Sam Van Aken has donated one of his trees from the project “The Tree of 40 Fruit” to the South Williamsburg community garden La Casita Verde. Now they just need $2500 to cover the transport cost from Syracuse to Williamsburg. Donate on line.

In 2012, as I worked on an installation for the New York Hall of Science titled “a geography of being | una geografia de ser,” I enlisted the help of undocumented immigrant activists Cesar and Vishal. I asked them to help me conceptualize a video game that would portray some of the experiences commonly felt by immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. We met a few times over food and had extended discussions. I found some of their experiences and observations so enlightening that I have been meaning to post excerpts from the interviews that others may find helpful and insightful.

Below is one excerpt concerning day to day fears that they have lived with; fears that have been confronted by becoming activists and making their status public.

Other topics include assimlation/de-assimilation, going to college, romantic and familial love. Listen to all the interviews here.

Artist Monica Johnson created the online graphic novel “The Adventures of Dorrit Little” to bring some transparency to the mechanisms of the student debt system in the United States. According to the About page, the average undergraduate student loan debt is $27,000 and the average graduate student loan debt range is $30,000 to $120,000. This country has effectively created an educated population in indentured servitude.

The graphic novel is a quick read, however in eight chapters, the artist presents a concise and clear history of the origins of the student debt system and why it continues to prosper. If you live with student debt it is a very worthwhile read! Go to The Adventures of Dorrit Little by Monica McKelvey Johnson!

Play the NSA Game by choosing which word is a “Terrorist Threat or Harmless Phrase?” an NSA word guessing game. You will see two words, one is listed in the NSA’s watch list, the other is not, can you guess which one is not listed? The two words are set against a blue sky background with puffy clouds, flying birds, green grass and a nice tree. However, every time that you guess wrong a hidden image below the natural landscape is revealed, a dark image of a surveillance society.

Four wrong guesses and the natural landscape is entirely gone, instead a Google search window appears with your bad picks filled into the search field… Click search and your IP may now be added to the NSA watch list as you search for key terms on the NSA database.

The project is a second of a series by artist Grayson Earle who a few weeks ago created NSA Haiku Generator that does just what the title describes. With both of these projects the artist is problematizing the fact that the NSA maintains such a list and the list itself. The games portray how inane the list is and contribute to their pointlessness by generating more searches with these terms by anyone playing the games.

See a physical installation by the artist titled “NSA Lights” at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute this Saturday, December 14th, 2013 located at 47-49 East 65th Street, New York as part of Hunter’s Integrated Media Arts MFA exhibition.

Artist and IMA MFA candidate Grayson Earle has just launched the NSA Haiku Generator. Set against a GIF-style rainbow sky background is a haiku composed of NSA watch words. The use of any of these 845 words or character combinations over internet communications can land one on the NSA’s terrorist watch list. Grayson Earle edited the list down to some 300 terms to construct haikus that poke fun at what seems like a ridiculously sweeping effort to construct a flawed terrorist watch list. As the artist states:

This web app uses the NSA’s database of terms which can land you as a suspected terrorist if you use them in electronic communication. Rather than being all ‘doom and gloom,’ I decided to make a game out of it. I’ve assigned each phrase a syllable count which enables you to create random haikus out of hundreds of words.

Click the haiku text to generate new haikus and then share them over various social media, to make the NSA list even more pointless.

The information page to the site also presents links to organizations that are taken a serious stance against the NSA monitoring of our electronic communications:
Fight For The Future
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Stop Watching.Us and the October 26th Rally in DC

Today, I attended Suzanne Lacy’s discussion regarding “Between the Door and the Street” which was interesting and would require its own post. Following the discussion, I went for a quick stroll through the museum and discovered Valerie Hegarty’s “Alternative Histories” – three installations in the period rooms. The Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms have always struck me as precious, spaces that remain intact for the visiting tourist to enjoy, so it was a real surprise to see that the museum would allow a contemporary artist to intervene upon these rooms. It’s particularly surprising as the installations are critical of the history portrayed in the period rooms. Valerie Hegarty tears away at the pristine nature of these rooms that reflect early U.S. Puritanism and a humble nobility, by presenting rooms that are in decay, crows or woodpeckers have entered the rooms and tear away at the objects. The rooms effectively bring to question the heroism of early U.S. history and remind us of the horror that early settlers brought to Native Americans and the natural landscape.

I recently re-visited this very important mockumentary from 1978 and need to make a note of it. “Agarrando Pueblo (aka The Vampires of Poverty)” was shot in Cali, Colombia, 1978 and is a satiric mockumentary critiquing the popularity of documentaries capturing Latin American poverty in the 1970s. Mayolo and Ospina coined the term “pornomiseria” or “pornography of misery” in reference to the objectification of poverty in Latin America for Eurocentric audiences.

The director and cameraman move quickly around the city requesting a taxi driver to take them to spots where they can capture poor children, crazy people and whores. The directors have a recipe of necessary vignettes to compose the documentary. When pedestrians confront the film makers they dismissively tell them that it’s to inform the world or that they don’t understand what this film is about. At one point the director is filmed some cocaine in his hotel bathroom between shots.

The film is available on Vimeo.

In August, Brooke and I had lunch at the Turntable Cafe located in old railroad yards of Helsinki. We were primarily doing research regarding urban composting and gardening. These railroad yards had been abandoned and in 2012, one of the railway turntables was transformed into a greenhouse and rebranded as Turntable, an experiment in urban gardening. During the summer months, every Friday lunch is available at Turntable and the food that is served is made from what is grown at the garden. Turntable is a great example of industrial wasteland being transformed into a productive area by a small group of people. The food was delicious and inexpensive.

The greenhouse built around the turntable i-beams can easily be deconstructed. I found more information regarding Turntable on the portfolio site of Paiva Raivio, one of the artists who collaborated on the transformation of the railway turntable in to the garden and cafe, she states

Turntable is an urban garden, cafe, greenhouse and an open, public space situated in Pasila´s historical railway yard. It was set up by Dodo´s activists: Jaakko Lehtonen, Kirmo Kivelä, Joseph Mulcahy and myself.

The spot is where Dodo´s (an environmental NGO based in Helsinki) urban farming movement begun when gardeners took over a wasteland in 2009. In 2012 we transformed Turntable into an urban farming test lab and source for learning and inspiration. During it´s first year in action Turntable has offered various workshops, events and locally grown food in the Turntable-cafe. The garden also has a beehive, dry toilet, composts, cob oven and solar panels to produce energy.

Go to Paivi Raivio’s page on Kääntöpöytä / Turntable Urban Garden to read more and see photos.

Last week, our friend and artist Minna Langstrom introduced Brooke and I to Ulla Taipale who is coordinating BiofiliA – a bio-art lab at Aalto University in Helsinki. Ulla was so generous as to give us a tour of the lab which consists of an electronics area, a wet lab and biology lab. It was amazing to see a university dedicating the funding and facilities to a relatively avant-garde practice of combining biology and art. Pictured above is Ulla to the right and the lab manager a recent bio graduate of the university.

As the BiofiliA site states, the project is “a biological art unit was launched under the Aalto ARTS in 2012. It offers a platform and infrastructure for trans-disciplinary research and education that aim at creating cultural discussion and innovation around the topics related to the manipulation of life and biological processes at a practical and theoretical level, including philosophical and ethical dimensions…”

Artists that have worked collaboratively with scientists at BiofeliA include Oron Catts of SymbioticA, Christina Stadblauer, Kiran Gangadharan, Agnes Meyer-Brandis and they hope to bring Paul Vanouse for 2014. Art and biology students may take courses at BiofiliA and work along side of resident artists.

One of the ongoing projects exists outside the labs – Hexa-Hive Village an experiment with urban bee keeping. The hives were designed by Christina Stadlbauer and Kiran Gangadharan. And beyond producing honey, Till Bovermann of Media Lab Helsinki has installed contact microphones in one of the hives for “project hive listening.”

Artist, performer, activist, professor Larry Bogad recently posted his TEDxUCDavis talk on YouTube. It’s well worth checking out and may inspire some fun and thoughtful hijinks!